'Western writers are part of oppression'

The annual presentation of the International PEN Awards during the opening of Winternachten in The Hague is never a truly convivial affair. After all, every year at least one of the awardees cannot receive the prize herself. Because she has been captured, because he is missing, or ill. This year, Thursday 14 January at the Theater aan het Spui, for the first time none of the winners could attend.

Turkish journalist Can Dundar was arrested in November after he revealed how President Erdogan's family supplies weapons to IS. He has been detained for another 51 days. His wife accepted the award. Omar Hazek would come first. The Egyptian poet and critic of the Moubarak regime had been detained for subversive activities, but had since been free for a few weeks. On Thursday morning, 14 January, he was stopped at Alexandria airport. He could not fly to The Hague to receive his PEN Award.

The Egyptian's fate then still compares favourably with that of the third winner. From the Eritrean poet Amanuel Asrat for no one knows whether he is alive at all since he was arrested in 2001. His friend Habtom Yohannes did the honours for the vanished poet. But not without a firm reproach to Asrat's Western colleagues. According to Yohannes, they have done nothing since 2001 to free their Eritrean colleague. There have been no actions, no boycotts. Instead, according to the forceful Yohannes, they allowed the Dutch government to invest 200 million in the corrupt dictatorship that is Eritrea. He was here to receive the PEN Award, but made it clear that he felt it was 15 years too late.

It is not customary to point out the giver of an award directly to its faults, and so Yohannes' accusation went emphatically not to the board of PEN International, but to its member authors. A subtle difference, but important enough not to completely soured the organisation that came under fire this year for a conflict over a prize for Charlie Hebdo. Manon Uphoff, president of PEN Netherlands, came back to it briefly, arguing that the West turns its gaze away from all writers who are really severely repressed worldwide, while here, where freedom of expression is never in danger, a single incident is blown up into a world disaster.

It will remain unsettled for a while, in writer's land.